


Unconventional Correspondence

by TrenchcoatButtons (orphan_account)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, First Date, First Meeting, Pre-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-12-24 07:11:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/TrenchcoatButtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Terrible days are always capable of turning around.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unconventional Correspondence

**Author's Note:**

> This is in response to all the shit about Vanessa being a model, it's also in response to a fantastic headcanon of my friend, toastheaven, who suggested they met at a bar on their own respective 'worst days ever'. Here's to you, my friend!  
> Also, the Morse code idea came from batsonthebrain, who is awesome and has great ideas. So this is for both of you guys! Lauren and Amanda, for being badass and having great headcanons. <3 
> 
> For shits and giggles, Hermann’s phone number is the first eight digits of the Fibonacci sequence. ;) (the area code is of course, the London area code.) The idea of him leaving his number in roman numerals at all is from the Texts from the Shatterdome tumblr. :>  
> I’m not from England, so I hope I got the phone number format correct! Apologies if it’s wrong.

**June 7, 2013**   
**London, England**

 

It’s the worst day of Vanessa’s life.

She’s had a lot of bad days in her life, make no mistake, but this one is something like the straw that broke the camels back.

Things had just been slightly off their axis all day, she couldn’t 100% place what it was about, but things had been a bit wrong since she’d smacked her alarm clock into submission that morning. Her toast had burnt, her bus had run late, she’d snapped the heel on one shoe and so she’d had to snap off the other to compensate. Her shoot had taken way too long, and the photographers and shoot director had not been completely satisfied with anything she’d done, only finally settling on something they deemed ‘good enough’ and shooing her away. She’d been stressed and frazzled after that, but had still accepted the offer for drinks from the cameraman she’d been working with because he’d seemed nice enough and he’d been okay to work with despite the stress of the shoot. She’d figured maybe it would be a good stress release, go out on a date, have a few drinks... But a few hours and two glasses of wine later had only landed her with the same bloody phrase she always seemed to run across on dates these day.

“You know you’re really smart for a model.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well you know, you’re just so gorgeous-”

“You didn’t expect me to have two brain cells to rub together, is that it?”

“No, I just mean-”

“I know what you meant. I’m done here, thank you for the drink.”

She didn’t feel bad about walking out of the restaurant, didn’t feel even a little bit bad about dumping the check on him. She’s heard that damn line too many times, the surprise that she’s working on her degree and the curiosity about why she’s even bothering since she’s already making a name for herself in the modeling world.

She’s had hundreds of people tell her how beautiful she is, how gorgeous she looks, how flawless her skin is and how elegant her eyebrows are. She hears those things every day, and they got old a long time ago.

It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate it, she does. She’d just really enjoy hearing something else for once in her life. Maybe something like “Hey, Vanessa, you make a fantastic blueberry crumble!” or “You know what, Van, you’re right, the PM needs to get his head out of his ass,” or “Vanessa I think your thoughts on environmentalism and conservation are excellent, we should do a shoot to highlight the issues,”.

She’d even take just hearing ‘You’re very smart’ for once, without the addition of ‘for a model’.

It drives her insane that there are conditions to who she is.

She’d gotten into modeling by accident, sort of. Nearly done with her second year of university, on her way to a Mechanical Engineering degree when she’d agreed to model a dress for her friend Sylvia’s final design project. One thing had lead to another, and before she’d really known what she was doing she’d been splitting her life up between classes and modeling. She adored doing both things, liked tinkering with things in her flat, liked reading all the journals and slowly working on her post-graduate degree, liked wearing beautiful things and painting her face, liked walking into a room as a living, breathing work of art.

But she didn’t like the crappy comments that insinuated she couldn’t be both things. She got them constantly, had gotten the ‘Wow you’re so pretty to be an engineering student’ since she was 18, and now she was getting ‘Wow you’re so smart to be a model’.

The long and short of it being, that was how she ended up at a classy little pub on the other side of the city, wearing a too-expensive dress and being ogled by a good chunk of the patrons. It wasn’t the most high-class place she could have gone to, but she was sure there would be nobody she knew here, which was precisely what she wanted. Several patrons had asked to buy her a drink, and she’d politely declined, citing that she really just wanted to have a few drinks and go home. She was grateful that they had all decided to take her word on the matter and leave her be. She was going to get drunk, go home, pass out, and hope tomorrow the world was less thick.

Vanessa hadn’t expected, however, the man two bar stools away from her, dressed in an ill-fitting sweater and suit jacket, to be muttering himself furiously the entire time she sat there. He’d already been slumped over a bit at the bar when she had arrived, talking to the bartender about something she hadn’t been in the mood to pay attention to. His hair looked like it was impeccably parted not too long ago, but it’s a mess now, and there’s a cane resting next to him beneath the bar top.

At first, she’d tried to ignore him, thinking it the absurd ramblings of a drunkard. The longer she sat there though, and the more glasses of wine she went through, the more she started listening in. Making out words like ‘brainwave emulation’, 'pop culture misconceptions', and ‘oversimplified neuron model’.

She’s not particularly well-versed in Artificial Intelligence research, she’d always been a bit more of a hands-on tinkerer than the computational stuff. But it’s still fascinating, still tantalizing, and he’s not her usual type when she goes looking for someone to chat up in a pub, but… She scoots over two seats and suddenly they’re both engaged in a very alcohol-fueled conversation about Artificial Intelligence research, the validity of such, about robotics and their application in the real world, about brain waves and about mathematics. He’s tugged a pen from an internal pocket somewhere and is scribbling on a napkin, explaining something to her that his father said and that he disagreed with and here’s why and what do you think?

She says something and he looks as if he’s never thought of that.

“That’s brilliant… You’re brilliant!”

And he goes back to scribbling on the napkin, raving about what she said, and she can’t even really remember what she said because there was no condition to it. She’s brilliant. End of story. She feels awake, refreshed, incredibly drunk, and remarkably happy. Vanessa dives back into the discussion, words slurred and smile beaming.

It’s one in the morning when the bartender ushers them out, and Vanessa has nothing on her agenda in the morning that she can remember, so instead of parting ways she drags him down a few streets to her flat so they can continue the conversation over tea. Except tea never happens, what does happen is her hands in his hair and warm tongues that taste like dark beer and red wine. What does happen is she pushes him down on her bed and climbs on top of him while they’re both naked as the day they were born, and what does happen is he mutters that she’s beautiful and brilliant. There is no exception or condition, she’s just both.

She doesn’t end up remembering much of the sex, but she remembers that she enjoyed it and that this man is not so frumpy and skinny beneath the grandfather clothes. His body is also not altogether that impressive, but she is used to toned and sculpted model men that she attracts. He does have strong arms and a very delightful torso, and the rest of him is rather beautiful in its way, even if it’s not what she so often finds herself lying next to. Vanessa herself is taller than this man, and there are what feels like a hundred physical differences that mean this shouldn’t quite work out. Still, their contrasting skin tones looks beautiful together and his breath is deliciously warm on her neck, and all the differences and incompatibilities fly out the window when she finds the spot on him that makes him hiss in delight.

She doesn’t really remember falling asleep, but she remembers kissing him goodnight.

 

\-----

 

He has no idea where he is.

There is light in his eyes and he hears a ringing sound, but after a moment of thought he comes to conclusion that the ringing is his own head.

He has never been this hungover in his life. He’s never even really been hungover before. He’s never woken up in a strange place before, either.

It doesn’t matter, what does matter is that he is in a bed that isn’t his, in a room that isn’t his, which probably means this flat isn’t his, and there is- oh good lord.

There’s a woman next to him.

He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to think, but his head is pounding and everything is a bit fuzzy.

This doesn’t happen to him, this has never happened to him, what would his father say?

He remembers... Fighting with his father on the phone about the worth of AI research. He had dipped into the bottle of wine at his flat, but that had lead to going out to a bar for a good dark beer like he hadn’t had since he was last in Berlin. Remembered complaining to the bartender, remembered animatedly speaking with a brilliant woman- that must be the naked woman beside him- oh God she’s naked.

Oh God HE'S naked.

He feels like his brain has short circuited, he needs to get out of here. He’s careful about extricating himself from the blankets and locating his clothing, desperate not to wake her. He doesn’t want to be rude or anything, what if leaving is rude? He’s never done this before he doesn’t want to give her the wrong impression. How did any of this even happen? What’s the proper protocol? Did he solicit her? That didn’t sound like him, but he had drank an awful lot last night. He doesn’t want her to be embarrassed waking up next to him, he’d been in a terrible state the night before. He hopes she had a good time, whatever had happened… Wait… He remembers…

Talking for a very long time in a pub about robotics and AI research, she’d invited him back to her flat, she had kissed him, she had lead him into the bedroom.

This has never happened before, and Hermann has no idea what to do.

Trousers half fastened, sweater clutched to his chest, he peeks over at the bed to look at her. She’s still fast asleep, comforter wrapped up around her like a cocoon, and Hermann suddenly remembers a honey-toned voice telling him his father’s a git and ought to listen to him for a change and what if you used actual human brainwaves as a template? He hadn’t thought of that, and it of course wouldn’t be that simple by any stretch of the imagination, both of them were far too drunk for particulars, but the suggestion had a degree of merit. Plus she’d badmouthed his father and very few people did that in regards to Lars Gottlieb.

He doesn’t remember the majority of last night, and he does not like having to piece together gaps in his own memory. But he can’t quite shake the sensation that is was one of the better nights he’s had in a long, long time.

He wants to crawl back into bed, wants to wake her up, but he’s nervous. Instead, he finishes pulling on his clothes and locates his pen and the napkin from last night. He finds a section that isn’t covered with drunken scribbles and carefully writes both his name and phone number on it. Hermann settles it on the nightstand. He finds the kitchen, gets a glass of ice water, locates some Paracetamol, and sits that next to the note.

Satisfied, but most definitely still petrified and concerned, Hermann makes his way out of the apartment and into the early morning streets London. Maybe she’ll call, he hopes she will, it’s entirely up to her, after all.

He’s already on the tube when he realizes, in his panic and from his habit of numbering things in that fashion, he wrote his entire phone number in Roman numerals.

By the time he gets to his flat, showers and changes into fresh clothes, he feels like the biggest idiot on the planet. He’s never been particularly excellent with the opposite gender, has always had a problem picking up on the correct cues. Today, it appears he has GIVEN all the wrong cues.

He checks his phone before making lunch, and discovers a message he must have missed in the shower. The number is unfamiliar, and for a moment he’s excited, maybe he didn’t mess up so badly. But the voicemail is… what appears to be a series of taps and clicks.

Is... Is that morse code?

 

\-----

 

When she DOES wake up, she’s surprisingly disappointed to find one side of the bed is cold. She wants to kick herself for getting her drunken hopes up, that thinking maybe something had sparked differently last night. It never had before, so why would this time be any different?

She should have known better.

The disappointment gets chucked right in the bin, however, when the second her head starts aching, she notices a condensation covered glass of water, little plastic bottle of painkillers, and a note on her bedside table.

The water and pills come first, and after that, she snatches the note. It’s the calculation-covered napkin from the night before, but NOW it has a name, and… What?

**Hermann Gottlieb**

**(0 II 0) 0 I I II - III V VIII I**

Well now she can put a name to the face from yesterday. Hermann Gottlieb is the intelligent, sour-faced man who gave her a compliment with no conditions. It takes her a few seconds to realize that the number is in Roman numerals, and Vanessa spends the next five minutes laughing.

It’s… the cutest thing she’s ever seen? She thinks. It’s definitely the silliest and the strangest. Is it a test? Did he do it on purpose? Is this Hermann Gottlieb really so ridiculous that he gave her his number in the most ridiculous way possible? Had he still been drunk?

She decides that whatever it is, she doesn't care. She needs to know this man beyond a one night stand. He’s too bizarre, too fascinating not to follow up on… But she almost feels like she’s been challenged. He put his number down in a ridiculous way, so she should be prepared to give him something to figure out as well. She gets dressed, pulls her hair up, and goes digging through her spare room, full of boxes and materials, a dress stand and a box of computer parts.

In a drawer, she finds an old Telegraph key given to her by her grandfather when she enrolled in university. She’s never managed to find out if it’s from back in World War II, but it sure looks like it, and it will serve the purpose she wants it for well. She practiced with this thing for hours, had used it to send silly messages to her engineering friends. In uni they’d managed to eke out a system for chatting during lectures via morse code, and the straight key had come in very handy for practicing. Leaving a message in morse code… Well that might be overestimating his stunt with the Roman numerals, but it’s only if she gets voicemail. If he DOES answer, she’ll have to just ask him out the old fashioned way.

Well, what she has planned is about as old-fashioned as it gets.

Either way, if he answers, it’ll be fine. If he doesn’t, then she’s got a plan. Vanessa punches in the numbers, readies the straight key, and listens as the dial tone fades into ringing. She hopes he DOESN’T answer, because this is exciting, this is fun, this is different.  

The ringing stops, there’s a click, and she gets a little jolt as she realizes it’s gone to voicemail, and she hears a stern voice come over the receiver. He sounds stuffy and uptight and far different of a man than she remembers speaking with last night. Vanessa is suddenly nervous, but she’s come this far, she’s not about to turn back now.

_“You’ve reached Doctor Hermann Gottlieb. I’m not at my phone right now, but please leave a message and I will return your call as soon as I am able.”_

There’s a sharp beep, and Vanessa holds the phone up to the straight key, pressing her finger against the button and beginning her message.

 

\-----

 

It’s definitely morse code, he realizes, dots and dashes from what sounds like an actual Telegraph, not just tapping something on a hard surface. It takes him several seconds of pure shock before he saves the message and goes scrounging for a pen and paper.

It doesn’t take very long to decipher, but he does have to listen to the message several times before he gets the whole thing.

**“Oh you are a Doctor? You did not mention that last night. Loved the number this morning, did not love so much that you left. I suppose they balance out. My name is Vanessa, and I had an excellent time yesterday. I was wondering if you would like to get together tomorrow night? Please reply.”**

His face feels very warm when he’s done reading what he’s scribbled out on the piece of paper.

She had a good time.

 

\-----

 

His response arrives via two photo messages later that evening. Two chalkboards, one covered in mismatched letters, and a second with a code key.

He wants to have dinner.

 

\-----

 

Her second correspondence comes in the form of several photo messages of singular words, and he prints them out and arranges them in the proper order.

They have a time and place.

 

\-----

 

The ninth is his birthday, but he’s never taken much stock in birthdays. They usually end up a rather depressing affair, be it lack of friends to spend it with, or lack of time to celebrate it. But today he’s verging on excited, if not heavily nervous. He’s been on… dates here and there, nothing substantial but he is by no means a complete virgin in the area of romance. (And even if he had been, he certainly isn’t one after the other night. Though every time he thinks about that his neck goes very red and he gets a might flushed and… Yes.)

They meet at a nice little restaurant, and it’s a thrill to meet her when he’s not drunk off his rocks. He formally introduces himself and she gives him a little hug. Nobody has ever been this affectionate with him, it’s… Bizarre. The conversation is halted and difficult to figure out. Last night he remembers everything flowing easily, everything being simple, but now it’s so not… Relationships have nuances and curves that he doesn’t understand, lines and edges that don’t mesh well with how he sees his own psyche. This is a complex equation that he has never studied.

“Oh- how you left your number, by the way, it really was fantastic. You do that with all the girls you meet?”

“Certainly not- I suppose it was more of an accident than an intentional quirk. I.. admit I may have been a bit… unnerved.”

She settles across from him at the table and grins. “Unnerved? You?”

“Well I’ve- I’ve never exactly had that sort of night before. I wasn’t exactly aware of protocol for the um. Morning after.” his face is beet red, and he’s trying very hard not to be too crass or loud. He wrings his napkin on the top of the table and tries not to make eye contact with her, suddenly hyper-aware of his surroundings and his history with bad first impressions. Before he can stammer out some excuse to cut this short, there’s a hand on his knuckles.

“Hermann- relax. It’s really okay. I had a fantastic time. I’d like to have another fantastic time, if you’re interested?”

He glances up to meet her eyes, and the anxiety distances itself from him. She’s being honest, smiling and truthful.

“I most definitely am. My apologies.”

“It’s alright. So, tell me, a Doctor?”

Conversation starts to trickle in after that, discussing respective degrees and where each of them are working currently, how his Doctorate is recent but how very proud of it he is. He asks her about the Telegraph key she must have used to leave her message, and suddenly conversation erupts from the floodgates just like it did last night. They share a bottle of wine and talk about where they grew up and tidbits of their family. He talks about TU in Berlin, she regales him of her exploits in Engineering school, he prattles on about his desire to work with robotics, she explains to him the intricacies of a modeling shoot.

“So what do you think of that?”

“Of what?”

“Me being a model, I mean.”

He blinks. “I think it’s wonderful. You clearly enjoy it, and do well with it. If it’s what you love, then I hardly see how my opinion on the fact matters.”

She gives him a truly beautiful smile, and says she was just curious.

It’s a wonderful night, and halfway through she weasels it out of him that it’s his birthday and orders a flaming dessert for the two of them to share. They split the check and they take a long, relaxing walk back to her apartment. She kisses him goodbye, and they make plans for the following weekend.

They linger at the door, as if maybe both of them want to say be damned with work in the morning.

 

\-----

 

Dinners at restaurants and walks in the park turn into pleasant evenings at each others flats, and those turn into spending entire days together, and then nights together.

Before either of them is really aware of it, June fades into July. Vanessa is fascinated by Hermann’s mind, his awareness of the world and the things within i. He is struck with sudden ideas at strange hours and she watches him leap to his feet and spend thirty minutes writing calculations across the chalkboards that are strewn across his flat. He takes photos of them and puts them into his computer, and that is how he records it all. He says it just makes sense to do something tactile before putting it in digitally, at least to him.

She never thought she’d really like the smell of chalk, but since she’s met him the curious mix of chalk, tea, and wool sweaters has become a much-loved scent. (She’s even stolen one or two of the particularly hideous argyle jumpers of his, and he hasn’t even noticed.) Vanessa finds herself reaching for his hand out of habit, even when they are in separate parts of the city, finds that waking up without him puttering around the kitchen is far less preferable to waking up with him putting the kettle on. Every compliment he gives her, and he gives them often, are a mix and mash of the same things, but they are never singular, never with conditions. They are always both. He loves that she loves what she does, and he loves that she likes to fiddle with the electronics in both their flats, and he likes watching her shuffle into the kitchen wearing his jumpers and stealing his tea.

July begins to fade and suddenly Hermann realizes he doesn’t remember what his flat smelled like before it had assimilated the perfumes and the mint candies that Vanessa keeps in her purse. She has a wicked sweet tooth and so he started keeping a package of German chocolate in his flat for every time she comes over. He’s not much of a sweets man himself, but the mint and the chocolate is suddenly the best taste in the world when she’s kissing him.

She’s not much of an early riser, but he is, and that’s just fine for both of them, actually. She likes waking up to the smell of tea on the kettle he likes the still silence of daybreak over London. Their lives begin to mesh together, and he is constantly starstruck by the things she says and the ideas she has. She is an incredibly affectionate woman,

Two months have flown by, and the afternoon of August tenth, he arrives at her flat, harried and distressed, urging her to put on the news.

What she sees makes her blood run cold.

“Hermann-”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows what it is.”

She watches as a shaking camera pans up, up over San Francisco bay, and sees the monster that has arrived on America's shores. They sit on her couch and watch the broadcast all day, hands claspers and locked in a state of fear and confusion. This isn’t possible, this isn’t some terrorist attack, this isn’t nations warring or a natural disaster.

This is straight out of a fantasy film. This is a monster movie in stark, bright reality, horrible and factual.

Six days later, the creature they called ‘Trespasser’ finally falls, nuked in Oakland by a combined unit of US and UK forces. Tens of thousands are dead, three cities are destroyed. America is devastated, but as humanity has always done, they regroup and begin to pick up the pieces. They mourn, they immortalize, they rise above.

Eight months later, it happens again. By now they’ve moved in together, into Vanessa’s flat for space and ease of commute. They have spent holidays and birthdays and met each others families by now, and the world is still turning. The world is not ending, it seems. She travels a lot, yes, and it does her heart good to come home and find him there with her favorite brand of chocolate waiting for her. Fills her with joy to hug him and kiss him and bring him to the bedroom. She’s just arrived home from Milan when the second one hits, and he kisses her so desperately it makes her chest ache. She holds him close and they watch the news.

This time a monster hits Manila, and it takes three days to finally decide to nuke the behemoth, and Manila is contaminated to the point of it being nearly uninhabitable.

Vanessa watches Hermann leap up from the couch on the third day and start scribbling on the board closest, but he shakes it off as lack of evidence and sits back down.

“How could more than two ever possibly exist in the ocean?” he mutters to her, and she smooths his hair and agrees.

When the third hits Cabo, five months after the second, that’s when Hermann spends two hours on a chalkboard, crunching numbers and looking stricken. Numbers are his way of working out the world, she knows by now. He sees a pattern emerging, he says, or at least the very shaky beginnings of one. It’s bound to happen again, of course it will happen again.

In September, what has now been called a Kaiju by the world that they name Scissure attacks Sydney, and they take it down. But things are growing desperate, and Hermann gets called along with his father to a conference in Seoul. When he comes home he tells her about the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, how they want him to help on something called the Jaeger Project, how his father and him have been invited to Kodiak Island, in Alaska to undergo training.

She doesn’t want him to go, doesn’t want to be without him for such a long time.

So she asks him to marry her, and of course he accepts, he loves her, has loved her since he met her, always will. Before he disappears to the other side of the world, they exchange vows and say goodbye. There is no time for a honeymoon, no time to go gallivanting across the world to see monuments and visit museums.

It’s the worst day of Vanessa Gottlieb’s life, watching him board that plane into the unknown.

The following morning, however, she wakes up to find a box of her favorite chocolate on the doorstep, and a note written in a very familiar code.

When she finally does decode it, it bears a very simple message, for all the work it took to figure out what it says.

 **"I will see you as soon as possible. Expect more of these in the future."**  
  
It's not long before she's digging out her Telegraph all over again.


End file.
